Various sizes and types of drills are widely used in many industrial environments, such as in aircraft manufacturing, to create holes of various sizes. Such usage frequently results in drills of various sizes being collected in a common receptacle for resharpening, build-up removing, or refurbishing after the drills have become dull, coated with build-up, and the like during use.
In the past, regardless of whether the drills are conventional or quick change, “spent” drills are sorted and the buildup is removed prior to re-sharpened. Removing of build-up and sorting the large number of drills is a time consuming and, thus, costly endeavor. As a result, attempts have been made to automate at least the sorting portion of this procedure. In this regard, one currently known machine automatically separates drills of one diameter from a mixture of drills of various diameters using various means, such as a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) or laser analysis. However, there does not exist an effective and efficiently automatic build-up removing of large amounts of various-sized drills.
Therefore, there exists a need to quickly and effectively remove build-up on drills of various sizes.